Roman Ingarden

Roman Ingarden (1893 – 1970) was a Polish phenomenologist,
ontologist and aesthetician. A student of Edmund Husserl's from the
Göttingen period, Ingarden was a realist phenomenologist who spent
much of his career working against what he took to be Husserl's turn to
transcendental idealism. As preparatory work for narrowing down
possible solutions to the realism/idealism problem, Ingarden developed
ontological studies unmatched in scope and detail, distinguishing
different kinds of dependence and different modes of being. He is best
known, however, for his work in aesthetics, particularly on the
ontology of the work of art and the status of aesthetic values, and is
credited with being the founder of phenomenological aesthetics. His
work The Literary Work of Art has been widely influential in
literary theory as well as philosophical aesthetics, and has been
crucial to the development of New Criticism and Reader Response
Theory.

Roman Witold Ingarden was born on February 5, 1893 in Kraków.
He initially studied mathematics and philosophy in Lvóv, and in
1912 went to Göttingen where he studied philosophy under Edmund
Husserl, taking four semesters of seminars with Husserl, from 1912 to
1914, and again during the summer of 1915. Husserl considered Ingarden
one of his best students, and the two remained in close touch until
Husserl's death in 1938 (their philosophical correspondence was
eventually published as Husserl's Briefe an Roman Ingarden).
Ingarden also studied philosophy in Lvóv with Kazimierz
Twardowski (who, like Husserl, was a student of Franz Brentano). When
Husserl accepted the chair at Freiburg, Ingarden followed him,
submitting his dissertation “Intuition und Intellekt bei
Henri Bergson” in 1917, for which he received his Ph.D. in
1918, with Husserl as director.

After submitting his dissertation, Ingarden returned to Poland for
the remainder of his academic career, first teaching mathematics,
psychology and philosophy in secondary schools while he worked on his
Habilitationschrift. That work, published as Essentiale Fragen
in 1925, attracted some attention in the English speaking philosophical
world, being reviewed twice in Mind (by A.C. Ewing in 1926 and
by Gilbert Ryle in 1927).With the publication of his
Habilitationschrift, Ingarden was appointed as Privatdozent at the Jan
Kazimierz University in Lvóv, where he was promoted to Professor
in 1933. During this time his most well known work, The Literary
Work of Art, was first published (1931, in German), followed by
The Cognition of the Literary Work (1936, in Polish). His
academic career was interrupted from 1941–1944, when (due to the war)
the university was closed, and he secretly taught philosophy at the
university, and mathematics to secondary school children in an
orphanage. At the same time (and despite the bombing of his house in
Lvóv), Ingarden was working intensively on his magnum opus
The Controversy over the Existence of the World (the first two
volumes of which were published in Polish in 1947 and 1948
respectively). In 1945 he moved to Jagellonian University in
Kraków, where he was given a chair in 1946, however in 1949,
(under Stalinization) he was banned from teaching because of his
alleged “idealism” (ironically, a philosophical position against which
Ingarden fought for most of his life) and for being an “enemy of
materialism”. The ban continued until 1957, at which point
Ingarden was reappointed to his post at Jagellonian University, where
he taught until his retirement in 1963 and continued to write,
publishing such works as The Ontology of the Work of Art
(1962) and Experience, Artwork and Value (1969). Ingarden died
suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 14, 1970, while still fully
engaged in his philosophical projects. A careful, detailed, and fully
documented account of Ingarden's biography may be found in
[Mitscherling, 1997], which also does much to settle the
inconsistencies in earlier partial accounts of Ingarden's life.

Like many of Husserl's students from the Göttingen period,
Ingarden is a realist phenomenologist who ardently resisted Husserl's
apparent turn to transcendental idealism in the Ideas and
thereafter. Although his training is phenomenological, his work on the
whole is directed not towards understanding the basic structures of
consciousness, but rather towards ontology. Indeed, Ingarden is one of
the foremost practitioners of phenomenological ontology, which attempts
to determine what the ontological structure and status of objects of
various types must be, based on examining essential features of any
experience that could present or provide knowledge of such
objects—a method based in the assumption that there are essential
correlations between kinds of objects and the modes of cognition by
means of which they can be known.

Ingarden's best-known works, indeed the only ones known to most of
his readers in the English-speaking world, are his works on aesthetics,
especially literature—works that offer unrivalledly sophisticated
and subtle accounts both of the ontological status of works of art of
various kinds, and of our means of cognizing them. His phenomenological
approach to aesthetics strongly influenced the work of Michel
Dufrennes, and there are also strong resonances between his work on the
ontology of art and contemporary analytic work in aesthetics, e.g., by
Joseph Margolis, Nelson Goodman and Jerrold Levinson. The Literary
Work of Art has been particularly influential in literary studies,
where its effects are visible in Wolfgang Kayser's work Das
sprachliche Kunstwerk and in the development of the schools of New
Criticism and Reader Response Theory in the work of such theorists as
René Wellek and Wolfgang Iser, respectively.

Nonetheless, the frequently exclusive focus on Ingarden's work in
aesthetics is somewhat unfortunate and can be misleading about his
overall philosophical focus and goals, for Ingarden produced an
enormous body of work on a wide variety of topics. He was among the
first to (in 1934) raise the classic criticism of logical positivism
that the verifiability criterion of meaning is itself unverifiable, and
produced a large body of work in epistemology, ontology, metaphysics,
phenomenology, and value theory. The relative obscurity of Ingarden's
work in these other areas is attributable in part to the relative
isolation and interruption of academic philosophy in Poland in the
period of World War Two and Soviet occupation, and in part to language
barriers. Before the second world war, Ingarden (being German trained)
published his works mainly in German, thus his early works such as
The Literary Work of Art appeared in German early in his
career, and were to have a broad impact. But during the war, Ingarden
(in a gesture of solidarity) switched to writing in Polish, a language
speakers of English and other Western European languages were unlikely
to read, and so his major works on ontology went largely unnoticed by
the wider European and Anglo-American philosophical circles. His major
work in ontology, The Controversy, for example, was not
translated into German until 1964, and (except for a small part,
printed under the title Time and Modes of Being) remains
unavailable in English.

Seen more as a whole, Ingarden's body of work revolves not around
aesthetics, but rather around the realism/idealism problem — an issue
that was to dominate his thinking ever since, as a young man, he
recoiled against Husserl's transcendental idealism. As I will discuss
in §3.1 below, Ingarden's work in aesthetics was actually
motivated by his interest in the realism/idealism problem. His studies
in fiction and the ontology of art were intended to form part of a
large-scale argument against transcendental idealism, based in
emphasizing the difference between ‘real’ entities entirely
independent of our minds, and social and cultural entities that (as
‘purely intentional objects’) owe their existence, at least
in part, to human consciousness — thus showing that, in virtue of the
very meanings of the ideas involved, the ‘real world’ as a
whole cannot be properly treated as a purely intentional object owing
its existence to consciousness.

In developing a positive position, Ingarden sought a middle path
between the reductive physicalist realisms popular among analytic
philosophers, and the transcendental idealism adopted by Husserl,
rejecting the simplistic bifurcation between entities that are
‘mind-independent’ and those that are ‘merely
subjective’. His most important and lasting contribution may lie
in providing a richer ontological framework that could track the
different ways in which many objects of the ‘life-world’ of
daily experience depend on human intentionality and on mind-independent
reality, and in developing a moderate realist position that offered
room not only for independent physical reality and for consciousness,
but also for the whole variety of life-world objects that owe their
existence, in part, to both.

Most of Ingarden's major work focuses on ontology, which he
considers a purely a priori enterprise, concerned not with
what actually exists, but with what could possibly exist (which
concepts are non-contradictory), and with what (according to the
contents of the relevant ideas) it would take for objects of various
kinds to exist, or entail if they existed. He thus contrasts ontology
with metaphysics, which is concerned with answering factual questions
about what sorts of things actually exist and what they are like.
Ontology, in Ingarden's hands, thus bears close resemblance to the
sorts of conceptual analysis that became common in analytic philosophy
in roughly the same period. Ingarden's work on the ontology of art is
ontological in this sense, e.g. he attempts to determine, by analysis
of the essential meanings of experiences that could present something
as a work of literature, music, or architecture, what sort of an entity
such an object would have to be to satisfy those experiences and
meanings, and how it would have to relate to consciousness and physical
objects.

Despite Ingarden's deep admiration for Husserl, one crucial issue —
transcendental idealism — divided them. Indeed, Ingarden was already
“tormented” by the problem for years before he completed
his dissertation [“Letter,” 422], and by 1918 had
definitively determined that he could not share Husserl's
transcendental idealism [Streit, vii]. Ingarden's concern with
and rejection of transcendental idealism directly or indirectly
determined the course of much of his later philosophical work, so much
so that in 1961 he describes his process of working on idealism as one
“which has been in fact occupying my entire scholarly
life.” [“Letter,” 437].

The transcendental idealism Ingarden rejects is the position that
the so-called ‘real world’ depends on consciousness for its
existence and essence; that it exists only for consciousness
and beyond that is a ‘nothing’. While there is some debate
among Husserl scholars over whether or not Husserl genuinely took the
‘turn’ to transcendental idealism in a metaphysical sense
(as opposed to merely treating it as if it were true while undertaking
the methodology of transcendental reduction), Ingarden clearly saw
Husserl as turning from the realism of the Logical
Investigations to a metaphysical form of transcendental idealism
by the time the first volume of Ideas was published, and the
two frequently debated this topic in letter and in person during the
period from 1918–1938.

Ingarden takes Husserl to have been driven to transcendental
idealism largely by his epistemological goals and transcendental
approach to phenomenology. If the very idea of three-dimensional
external objects makes sense, it would be essential that our
perceptions of them are inevitably inadequate: They may be presented
from one point of view or another, but never exhaustively and entirely
-- so room is always left open for new perceptions that would lead us
to entirely revise our past judgments. Such objects thus would
inherently transcend any finite set of experiences of them; no external
object could be part of any experience of it, and any judgments we
attempt to make about them would be open to doubt. Thus if
phenomenology is to be a ‘rigorous science’ grounded only
in what does not go beyond our experience, it must limit its study to
objects of ‘immanent perception’, the meaningful series of
(actual and possible) contents of consciousness rather than any
supposedly transcendent objects presented by them. Moreover, as Husserl
argues in §41 of the Cartesian Meditations, since the
transcendental ego is the source of all sense, any meaning of
‘transcendent object’ ‘outside of
consciousness’, etc. must be a meaning constructed through
layerings of the senses of our conscious acts, and transcendental
phenomenology can analyze how these meanings are built up out of other
meanings of individual acts of perception and intention (e.g. ‘is
perceived from this angle’, ‘could be perceived from
another angle, in these other ways’, etc.) This is the meaning
that the question e.g. ‘is this object real?’ may have from
within the standpoint of transcendental phenomenology. Any attempt to
go beyond this understanding of ‘transcendent object’ or
‘real object outside of consciousness’, however, to talk of
something beyond what can be constituted by any actual or possible
experience is literally going beyond what can be meaningfully asked; it
is literally non-sense. The very idea of a world outside of and
independent from all actual and possible experience is thus, from this
point of view, an illegitimate concept, a kind of disguised nonsense.
The only ‘real world’ of which we can legitimately speak,
have knowledge, or enter into other intentional relations with is the
‘real world’ as constituted by, and essentially correlated
with, meaningful series’ of intentional acts.

Ingarden accepted that, as long as we approach the realism problem
from the standpoint of epistemology, or from within the standpoint of
transcendental phenomenology, there is no way out to establish the
existence and knowledge of a mind-independent world. Nor, however, can
one establish that the real world depends on consciousness, since any
attempted talk about the world in-itself and its nature would be
meaningless — thus from that standpoint, the controversy over the
existence of the world would have to remain undecided. But he also
thought that other approaches to philosophy were legitimate, and indeed
that one should begin from ontology rather than epistemology.

According to Ingarden, the realism/idealism problem is fundamentally
a metaphysical problem (about the actual existence of the so-called
‘real’ world and its relation to consciousness), but may be
non-circularly approached via ontology by examining what the possible
sorts of relation between consciousness and the world could be. In
particular, Ingarden hoped that an ontological approach to the
realism/idealism problem could lead to a solution by attempting to
identify what the possible modes of being would be of the
‘real’ world and of consciousness, and how the two could
possibly be related. This was the motive for his monumental work in
ontology, The Controversy over the Existence of the World,
designed to describe the different possible modes of being and their
possible interrelations, with a view to narrowing down possible
solutions to the realism/idealism problem. Unfortunately, the work was
never fully completed (although the first two volumes were published
and the third in progress at the time of Ingarden's death), but the
portions that exist nonetheless contain many important and detailed
ontological analyses valuable in their own right as well as having the
potential to contribute to the discussion of the realism/idealism
controversy. Prominent among these is his distinction between formal,
material, and existential ontologies, and distinguishing ‘modes
of being’ as highest existential categories.

Most traditional category systems, such as Aristotle's, lay out a
single dimension of categories supposed to be mutually exclusive and
exhaustive. Ingarden, by contrast, develops a multi-dimensional
category scheme by dividing ontology into three parts: formal, material
and existential ontologies, corresponding to three distinct aspects
that may be discerned in any entity (its formal structure, material
nature, and mode of being respectively). These different formal,
material and existential aspects of the object, studied by the
different types of ontology, may thus be used to classify an object in
any of three interpenetrating dimensions (although not all combinations
among formal, material and existential modes are possible).

The formal categories are marked by such familiar ontological
divisions as those between objects, processes and relations. Following
Husserl, in addition to these, Ingarden distinguishes material
categories, with high-level material kinds including, e.g., works of
art and real (spatio-temporal) objects. Finally, claiming there is an
essential ambiguity in the term ‘exists’, Ingarden also
goes on to distinguish different existential categories or “modes
of being” — different ways in which entities may exist, e.g.,
dependently or independently, in time or not, contingently or
necessarily, etc.

The modes of being are defined in terms of different characteristic
combinations of ‘existential moments’. The existential
moments mostly concern either an object's temporal determinations (or
lack thereof), or the different dependencies it bears (or does not
bear) to other sorts of object. Indeed in drawing out his existential
moments, Ingarden goes beyond Husserl's influential work on dependence
to distinguish four different existential moments of dependence (and
their contrasting moments of independence): Contingency (the dependence
of a separate entity on another in order to remain in
existence); Derivation (the dependence of an entity on another in order
to come into existence); Inseparateness (the dependence of an
entity that can only exist if it coexists with something else in a
single whole); and Heteronomy (the dependence of an entity for its
existence and entire qualitative endowment on another). In so
doing, Ingarden develops one of the richest and most detailed analyses
of dependence ever offered, providing distinctions in the notion of
dependence that can clarify many philosophical problems including but
certainly not limited to the realism/idealism problem.

Ingarden's four highest existential-ontological categories or
‘modes of being’ are: Absolute, Real, Ideal, and Purely
Intentional. The absolute mode of being could be exhibited only by a
being such as God, which could exist even if nothing else whatsoever
ever existed. The ideal mode of being is a timeless mode of existence
suitable for platonistically conceived numbers; the real mode of being
is that of contingent spatio-temporal entities such as the realist
assumes ordinary rocks and trees to be; while the purely intentional
mode of being is that occupied by fictional characters and other
entities which owe their existence and nature to acts of consciousness.
Thus the realism/idealism controversy can be reconfigured as the
controversy over whether the so-called ‘real world’ has the
real or purely intentional mode of being.

By far Ingarden's best-known and most influential work, especially
in the English-speaking world, is The Literary Work of Art,
which was written around 1926, and first published in German in 1931.
It is fundamentally a work in ontology, in Ingarden's sense (see
§2 above), laying out the essential features anything must have to
be counted as a literary work, what parts it must have and how they are
interrelated, and how such entities as literary works relate to other
sorts of entities such as authors, copies of texts, readers, and ideal
meanings.

As with so much of Ingarden's philosophical work, he undertakes this
study of the ontology of the literary work in part with the motive of
utilizing its results to argue against transcendental idealism —
indeed he conceived of The Literary Work of Art as a
preliminary study for The Controversy. Literary works and the
characters and objects represented in them were to provide examples of
purely intentional objects — objects owing their existence and essence
to consciousness. Thus a detailed study of works of literature and
their represented objects could serve to explicate the purely
intentional mode of being, with a view to contrasting this with the
real mode of being and ultimately demonstrating that it is impossible
to reduce the ‘real world’ to the status of a purely
intentional creation. [Streit, vii-viii]. Nonetheless, this
motive remains largely behind the scenes of the detailed studies of
language and literature in The Literary Work of Art, which can
be (and largely has been) described and evaluated without reference to
these broader motives, as an independent contribution to aesthetics and
literary theory.

The work begins by attempting to determine the ‘mode of
existence’ of the literary work — essentially the same problem
that today goes under the heading of understanding the ontological
status of works of literature, music, etc. In twelve concise pages, he
provides compelling reasons to reject both attempts to identify
literary works with “real” objects or events such as copies
of texts or the psychological experiences of authors or readers, and
attempts to identify them with platonistic “ideal” objects
such as ordered manifolds of sentences or meanings. Each such attempted
identification leads to various absurdities, e.g. the view literary
works are physical objects would lead us to say that such works differ
by chemical composition; the view that they are experiences of the
author would make them completely unknowable, while the view that they
are experiences of readers would prevent us from postulating a single
work Hamlet known by many readers; and the view that they are
ideal objects would entail that literary works may never be created and
cannot be changed, even by their authors.

As a result, works of literature cannot be classified in either of
the major categories of objects accepted by traditional metaphysics —
neither the categories of the real nor the ideal are suited for them.
Any acceptable ontology of literature thus must accept entities of
another category. As Ingarden ultimately argues towards the close of
the text, the literary work is a “purely intentional
formation,” derived from the sentence-forming activities of its
author(s), and founded on some public copy of these sentences, and also
depending for its existence and essence on a relation to certain ideal
meanings attached to the words of the text.

While the question of the ontological status of the literary work
forms the work's beginning, most of the details of the text are
dedicated to drawing out an “essential anatomy” of the
literary work, determining its essential parts and their relations to
one another. He conceives of this task as preliminary to any questions
of the values that works of literature may or may not have, as we will
be better able to see where values of different types can inhere once
we know what the different parts of the literary work are.

According to Ingarden, every literary work is composed of four
heterogeneous strata:

Word sounds and phonetic formations of higher order (including the
typical rhythms and melodies associated with phrases, sentences and
paragraphs of various kinds);

Meaning units (formed by conjoining the sounds employed in a
language with ideal concepts; these also range from the individual
meanings of words to the higher-order meanings of phrases, sentences,
paragraphs, etc.)

Schematized aspects (these are the visual, auditory, or other
‘aspects’ via which the characters and places represented
in the work may be ‘quasi-sensorially’ apprehended)

Represented entities (the objects, events, states of affairs, etc.
represented in the literary work and forming its characters, plot,
etc.).

Each of these strata has room for its own typical sorts of aesthetic
value (or disvalue); thus we may distinguish the values of rhythm,
alliteration, or mellifluousness at the level of word sounds, from the
values in interesting (or jarring) juxtapositions of ideas and concepts
at the level of meaning units, from the quasi-visual splendor of the
scene presented, from the values of sympathetic or complex characters
and intricate plots.

The values of a literary work, however, are not exhausted by the
separate values of its several strata, for the strata do not exist
separately, but rather form an ‘organic unity’. Among the
strata are various forms of mutual dependence and influence, and the
harmonies or disharmonies among the strata (e.g. between the halting
rhythms of a character's speech and his timid personality) may
contribute other aesthetic merits or demerits to the work. Most
importantly, in cooperation with the other strata, the stratum of
represented objects may present “metaphysical qualities”
such as the tragic, the dreadful, the peaceful and so on, which
characterize true works of art. The work of literature as a whole,
thus, is a “polyphonic harmony,” much like a piece of
polyphonic music in which each singer's voice may lend aesthetic
qualities of its own to the value of the whole, while the greatest
values of the work as a whole may lie in the intricate interrelations
among the values of all of the individual elements.

A stratified theory like Ingarden's has considerable strengths. It
provides a framework within which we can offer detailed analyses of
literary works identifying their many sorts of value or disvalue,
rather than simply passing judgment on the whole. As a result, many
apparent conflicts in judgments of taste may be resolved without
embracing subjectivism, by noting that the individuals concerned may be
passing judgment on different strata of the literary work. It also
enables us to understand stylistic differences among authors and over
time as differences in which strata are emphasized and which
de-emphasized, e.g. as many modernist works de-emphasize the
traditionally foregrounded stratum of represented objects in favor of
juxtaposed images at the level of schematized aspects (e.g. Virginia
Woolf's The Waves), or even background both of these to the
rhythms and sound patterns at the level of phonetic formations (e.g.
Edith Sitwell's nonsense poetry). Yet we can do so without seeing such
changes as forming a radical break or undermining the idea that these
are all part of a continuous literary tradition.

In 1928, immediately after writing The Literary Work of
Art, Ingarden expanded his analyses of the ontology of art from
literature, to also discuss music, painting, and architecture in a
series of essays originally intended as an appendix to The Literary
Work of Art. As it happened, however, the appendix was not
published along with The Literary Work of Art, and remained
dormant until after the war, when (in 1946) essays on the picture and
the architectural work were published in Polish. The three studies were
expanded and finally published in German in 1961, along with an article
on film, and were not translated into English until 1989. The late date
of their release and the fact that they remain little known is a great
shame, as they address many of the same ontological issues as those
debated in ‘analytic’ aesthetics, and provide not only
compelling arguments against many popular positions but also analyses
of the ontological structure of works of various kinds unsurpassed in
subtlety and detail.

The first three essays of The Ontology of the Work of Art,
“The Musical Work,” “The Picture,” and
“The Architectural Work” each attempt to determine the
ontological status of the work of art in question, its relation to
concrete entities such as copies of the score, sound events, painted
canvasses or buildings, as well as to creative acts of artists and the
conscious states of viewers. Each also examines whether and to what
extent the form of art in question, like the literary work, may turn
out to have a stratified structure.

The musical work, Ingarden argues, is distinct from experiences of
its composer and listeners, and cannot be identified with any
individual sound event, performance or copy of the score. But nor can
it be classified among ideal entities, since it is created by a
composer at a certain time, not merely discovered [Ontology,
4–5]. It thus apparently falls between categories such as the
‘real’ and the ‘ideal’, and so accepting the
existence of musical works (like literary works) seems to require us to
accept the existence of things in a category distinct from either of
those — that of purely intentional objects. The musical work is a
purely intentional object with its ‘source of being in the
creative acts of the composer and its ontic foundation in the
score’ [Ontology, 91]. In itself, a traditionally scored
work of Western music is a schematic formation full of places of
indeterminacy (e.g. it may be indeterminate exactly how loudly a note
is to be played, or how long it should be held), which are filled out
differently in various performances. Unlike the literary work, however,
the work of music is not a stratified entity, there being no essential
representing function of the sounds of the musical work (unlike the
sounds of a novel).

The picture, too, is a purely intentional object, created by an
artist and founded both in a real painting (a paint-covered canvas),
and in the viewer's operations of apprehending it. The picture as a
work of art cannot be identified with the real paint-covered canvas
hanging in a gallery, for the two have different properties and
different modes of cognitive accessibility. The picture can only be
seen, and indeed only seen from certain points of view; the painting,
by contrast, can be seen, smelled, heard, or even tasted, and can be
observed from any point of view. Ingarden also holds that the picture
as such (unlike the painting) is not an individual object of any sort
-- one and the same picture may be presented in many paintings (if they
are all perfect copies of an original). (It might be worth noting that
while this is plausible enough for the picture, considered as such, we
do typically treat works of visual art as one-off individual objects
(distinct from perfect copies or forgeries).) Moreover, the picture, to
be seen, requires that viewers take up a certain cognitive attitude
regarding it, not required to observe the painting.

“The Architectural Work” is perhaps the most interesting
of the three major essays in the Ontology of the Work of Art,
for it suggests how Ingarden's examination of works of art may be
broadened out to form the framework for a general theory of social and
cultural objects and their relations to the more basic physical objects
posited by the natural sciences. The architectural work might seem to
pose the crucial objection to Ingarden's view that works of art are
‘purely intentional objects’ having at least a
foundation of their existence in the intentional states of their makers
and viewers: “After all, the Notre Dame of Paris appears to be no
less real than the many residential buildings that stand in its
vicinity, than the island upon which it was built, the river that flows
nearby, and so on” [255]. Nonetheless, even in this case,
Ingarden argues, the architectural work is not a mere independent
‘real’ object, although it is founded on one (the
‘heap of stones’ forming its physical basis). For its
existence as an architectural work requires not only its creation by an
architect (rather than its coming into existence as a mere natural
formation), but also requires the ‘reconstructive acts of the
viewer’ taking up a certain attitude towards the real object and
helping co-constitute its aesthetic and even its sensible properties.
The work of architecture is thus a doubly founded object, which
“refers back not only to the creative acts of the architect and
the reconstructive acts of the viewer, but also to its ontic foundation
in a fully determined real thing shaped in a particular way”
[Ontology, 263].

(The fact that even such purely intentional objects as works of art
of various kinds are founded not exclusively in consciousness, but also
(in various ways) on real spatio-temporal objects, is also an important
part of Ingarden's arguments against idealism, suggesting that even if
the proper mode of being for the world of experience was
purely intentional being, that still would not be sufficient to show
that all that exists is a pure product of consciousness.)

This situation for architecture parallels that for a great many of
the social and cultural objects of our everyday experience in what
Husserl called the ‘life-world’. As Ingarden emphasizes, a
flag, for example, should not be identified with the mere piece of
cloth of which it is fashioned, for it has different essential
properties, and has an additional foundation in the mental acts of the
community that accept it as a flag and endow it with meanings and embed
it in norms of action (e.g. we are not to clean pots with it but to use
it in rendering military honors). Similarly, a church is not identical
with the real building on which it is founded, but rather is created
only through acts of consecration and the preservation of appropriate
attitudes in the relevant community. In virtue of its secondary
dependence on acts of consciousness, the church is endowed with various
(social and cultural) properties and functions that a mere ordered heap
of building materials cannot have. In this way Ingarden provides the
basis for an account of the nature of cultural and social objects that
takes neither the reductionist route of identifying them with their
physical bases, nor the subjectivist route of treating all objects as
mere social constructions. The life-world takes its unique place as the
common product of acts of consciousness and an independent real world,
and its existence (in quite specific ways) presupposes that of both of
those foundations.

In addition to his work on the ontology of art objects of various
kinds, Ingarden also undertook general work on the ontological status
of the aesthetic object and the nature of aesthetic values. On the
object side, as we have seen he distinguishes in each case between the
mere physical object and the work of art; but he also distinguishes
both of these from what he calls the “concretization”
(sometimes translated as “concretion”) of the work of art,
which he considers to be the true ‘aesthetic object’. The
work of art itself, in the case of most forms of art such as
literature, painting, or music, is what Ingarden calls a
“schematic formation.” That is, it has certain
‘places of indeterminacy’, many of which are filled in by
an individual interpretation or ‘reading’ of the work. Thus
in the case of literature, there are many places of indeterminacy at
the level of character and plot — unlike in the case of real people,
it is often simply indeterminate what a literary character had for
breakfast, how far she sat back from the table, what the table was made
of, etc. Such indeterminacies are generally partially filled in by the
reader in reconstructing the work, as the reader's background
assumptions help (at least partially) flesh out the skeletal imaginary
scene directly presented by the words of the text. Similarly, a
representational painting generally leaves indeterminate, e.g., what
the back of the person's head looks like in the case of a portrait,
what they are thinking, or what happens immediately before or after the
moment visually represented in paintings of historical events. Yet
again, viewers' reconstructive acts typically supplement these
indeterminacies in various ways, e.g. automatically grasping the lower
right corner of Breugel's ‘Fall of Icarus’ as presenting
the moment between a fall from the sky and the complete disappearance
of the body under water (not, e.g., as presenting an attempt at an
underwater handstand). Finally, in the case of music, a score leaves
indeterminate various elements such as the precise timbre and fullness
of tone, and these are filled out in different ways in different
performances of the work. In each case, (at least partially) filling in
the indeterminacies of the work through a reading, performance, or
viewing renders the work more ‘concrete’. Each work of art
permits of a variety of legitimate concretizations which, unlike the
work of art itself, may vary from viewer to viewer. If the concretion
occurs within the aesthetic attitude, an aesthetic object is formed
[Selected Papers, 93], and so many aesthetic objects may be
based on one and the same work of art.

Corresponding to this three-fold distinction between physical
object, work of art, and aesthetic object, Ingarden posits a three-fold
distinction among properties. While the mere physical object possesses
only value-neutral physical properties, the work of art may possess
both ‘axiologically neutral’ properties such as having a
certain sentence structure or bearing patches of color arranged in
certain ways, and artistic value qualities founded on these, such as
clarity or obscurity of expression, technical mastery in the way the
materials are worked, balance of composition, etc. Aesthetic values
such as serenity, sublimity, profundity, etc., though they exist
‘potentially’ in the work of art, only manifest themselves
in the aesthetic objects created through concretizing the work of art,
and characterize the aesthetic object as a whole, although their
appearance may depend on that of many particular properties of the work
of art and physical object. Since various aesthetic objects may be
based on one and the same work of art, these may also differ in their
aesthetic values. This can, at least in part, help account for the
variety of aesthetic judgments that may be formed apparently concerning
the same work of art.

Yet as usual, Ingarden is concerned to account for the role of
consciousness in constituting aesthetic values and the variations in
aesthetic judgments without embracing a subjectivism that would deny
that there is any better or worse in aesthetic judgment, each being a
mere report of the pleasure experienced by the one judging. Such
subjectivism is to be avoided by noting first, that some
concretizations are better suited to the work's demands than others,
more faithful, or better able to bring out the potential values in the
work. A careful interpreter and evaluator can, through repeated contact
with the work, come increasingly close to separating out idiosyncratic
elements of her interpretations from what is proper to the work.
Secondly, the aesthetic properties of the resulting concretization are
not arbitrary inventions of the viewer, nor are they based on the
pleasure she derives from the experience. Instead, their appearance
simply requires a competent viewer to observe the work's neutral and
artistic values in an aesthetic attitude. Thus here, as elsewhere,
Ingarden's goal is ultimately to account for the legitimate role of
consciousness in constituting many of the objects and properties
experienced by us, while also avoiding a pure subjectivism or universal
social constructivism by acknowledging the role of an independent
‘real’ world in founding the cultural objects and value
properties we so often concern ourselves with in daily life.

A complete (as of 1985) bibliography of Ingarden's works in English,
French, German and Polish and of secondary sources is available in the
edition of Ingarden's Selected Papers in Aesthetics cited
below.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.